John Wilson

The Eve of Destruction

I have a fondness for books that center on a particular year. If such a book swims into my ken, I'll generally read it—good, bad, or indifferent. There's a fascination in isolating a particular slice of time, and in seeing how an author frames it for our instruction and delight.

James Patterson's The Eve of Destruction: How 1965 Transformed America draws on the years of study that went into his Bancroft Prize-winning volume for the Oxford History of the United States, Great Expectations: The United States, 1945-1975, published in 1996. Patterson is Ford Foundation Professor of History Emeritus at Brown University. An eminent scholar, he tries his hand at popular history here.

Patterson acknowledges right away that many readers may wonder at the special significance he attaches to 1965. Nevertheless, he is adamant that "1965—the year of military escalation, of Watts, of the splintering of the civil rights movement, and of mounting cultural change and polarization—[was] the time when America's social cohesion began to unravel and when the turbulent phenomenon that would be called 'the Sixties' broke into view."

Most of the book is taken up with two of the themes Patterson identifies—escalating U.S. involvement in Vietnam and racial strife—and President Lyndon Johnson looms large throughout the narrative. Despite Patterson's efforts to tie these themes to 1965 in particular, the result is a rehashing of familiar stories that played out over many years.

Conscious of this, Patterson tries to ground his political narrative in the everyday experience of Americans in 1965. He tells us what songs topped the charts, what was on TV, what Time magazine was featuring, and so on. That fits rather uneasily with his thesis (he's driven to remark that in 1965, "as later," most Americans tended to be absorbed with matters close to home, not paying much attention to events in Southeast Asia). And so another move in his argument is required.

First, Patterson gives us glimpses of "America in Late 1964" (as his first chapter is subtitled), a "buoyant time for the majority of Americans." While noting some counter-evidence—particularly the state of most black Americans, mired in poverty and still suffering from blatant discrimination—he exaggerates the extent to which the national "mood" was confident and carefree. Then, in turn, he exaggerates the extent to which various events in 1965—cultural as well as political—announced a drastic shift in the national mood. (See, for example, his inadvertently comical analysis of the significance of "Satisfaction," released by Rolling Stones in 1965, and Bob Dylan's shift to electric music.) That shift was epitomized, for Patterson, in the song that gives his book its title: Barry McGuire's short-lived hit "The Eve of Destruction."

Patterson is a careful scholar. Periodically he will observe that "not everything changed in 1965." And yet having done that, he'll return to pushing his thesis, hard. It's possible, of course, to profit from a book like this even as one disagrees with the thesis: the reader can still come away with a deepened sense of a historical moment. It would have helped if Patterson had given us more of his own 1965. He tells us at the beginning that he turned thirty in 1965, "at which time I was a first-year assistant professor of US history at Indiana University in Bloomington." He adds that he "had become a father for the first time in December." Beyond that, though, we get little with a personal texture. Patterson's cultural references are bland stuff (Time gets more than a dozen citations).

I was around in 1965, too, turning seventeen midway through that year. Reading Patterson on the buoyant national mood "in late 1964," I remembered the time several years earlier, in 1961, when our family doctor (who started the house church we attended) gave me a tour of the bomb shelter he'd had constructed at his home. He and his wife were a vibrant couple, interested in all sorts of things—but he thought it prudent to have a bomb shelter in the back yard.

My 1965 overlaps a good deal with Patterson's, of course—anyone who was living in the United States at that time would have to say the same—and yet it was also quite different from his—different not only in detail but in flavor. One mark of that difference is the near-absence of religion from his account of a turning point (as he would have it) in the history of the United States. I've written elsewhere about Patterson's patronizing obtuseness on this subject, especially with regard to evangelical Christians; here it's more a matter of largely ignoring it altogether.

Don - Hyperbole can also be a way to point to a larger truth. I didn't write an entire book on a false premise. Patterson did. I think I am on pretty solid ground to suggest that "there is nothing new under the sun." We do ourselves a disservice anytime we look to the past and suggest that the world was a better place "back then." There was indeed great injustices, inequities and inequalities suffered by entire demographic groups prior to the 1960s. I used racial minorities and women as examples. The 1960s were chaotic and they ushered in ugliness and nonsense. Granted. But they also triggered awareness of and reaction against routine and officially sanctioned prejudice. I am NOT suggesting that the world is "better" today than in 1950. Injustice, inequality and evil still exist. I am questioning the premise that there is EVER a period in a fallen world that could be considered "ideal." My other point is that the 60s didn't occur in a vacuum. "The sins of the fathers...on the sons."

Don K

December 04, 201211:37am

Ken Enockson:
" men could sexually assault their wifes, daughters or other women with impunity." Really?
Were you alive at that time? If so, where? I remember men in my neighborhood intervening on behalf of an abused woman. We might be living in a working class neighborhood, but we did not want to be known as a neighborhood where such behavior was tolerated.
To generalize is to exaggerate. No places in America today where the same statement might be true? No places in our country where reporting rape is more hazardous than not reporting it?
The problem of those times is that there was no way to prove sexual assault as today. But to imagine that societal disapprobation of rape was less back then would reflect on a more limited environment. When a man was charged, it forever reflected on his parents. They would never fully recover. In mixed ethnic neighborhoods like my own, the shame would be felt by that ethnicity, as well. Often, today, we don't know our neighbors or care.

Ken Enockson

December 04, 20129:23am

I am becoming increasingly impatient with social commentaries (particularly evangelical ones) that look at the 60s as this sudden break from some golden age of "social cohesion." We look back fondly at the "greatest generation" of WWII and the post-war period that seems to confirm this narrative. Yet, we still had terrible social inequalities largely based on the color of ones skin. Women, who had contributed greatly to the war effort, were relegated back to being second-class citizens and men could sexually assault their wifes, daughters or other women with impunity. Will someone please explain to me how that was utopia?!?
Wilson rightly points to Patterson's exaggeration of the 'good times' prior to 1965. But Patterson is not alone. James Dobson built his career and a political and social countermovement based on the same myth.
The cultural and social upheaval of the 60s was the just dessert of a society that routinely ignored blatant injustice and inequality. We reap what we sow.